Chapter Text
Avery always loved the fireworks in his neighborhood. It reminded him of when he was younger, when he'd pretend to be asleep so he could stay up and play Minecraft until the crackles beckoned him to watch through the window. The red-and-gold sparks had always mesmerized him, swimming through his eyes until they dissipated in the inky sky. However, he had never bought any of his own once he had finally become old enough to stay up that late. He knew his money was better spent elsewhere, and he didn't want to catch a charge for it, so he'd usually peek through his blinds to watch them sparkle above the trees from his neighbors who were bold enough to celebrate.
Tonight, however, the first crack made him flinch.
His eyes were on his screen instead of the fireworks outside. It painted his face in the muted red of the death screen, overlayed over a world of pitch-black swathed around him. "Respawn" and "disconnect" meant the same thing to him at this point, only that one would take him back to the world's spawn and the other would take him to his desktop screen.
Either way, D3rlord wouldn't be there waiting for him. Either way, Avery was starting off the new year without him.
The strain around his eyes had started to swarm the forefront of his head, yet he couldn't bear to look away. It was probably only a fraction of what D3rlord3 could have possibly felt every time he dared to glance away from the screen. Call Avery stupid for wanting it, but he wished that he could have felt another fraction of that pain.
His hand clenched around his mouse. His cursor trembled as he moved it to the top button on the screen.
He didn't waste a moment. He couldn't care less about the trees and the shoreline that he had spawned on—the normal things about this Minecraft world. Avery didn't even take a second to toggle the world's coordinates before he began to run.
He was never good with gut feeling, but something more than instinct guided him to the strip mine. It was the same feeling that had racked every nerve in his body the moment he had turned left at that crossroad. It was the same feeling that flared and narrowed his vision on nothing else but his screen when he had walked through those garish yellow gates. It was the feeling that pulled him deeper into Hell on his screen like a riptide when the floor had given out from underneath him in the library, only settling into the gentlest, most lovely surf when he turned around and saw D3rlord3 standing right there.
Avery's stomach dropped when he ran down the steps and saw that he wasn't standing there in the center of the strip mine. Just the chest that had first welcomed him to his nightmare, now taunting him in the daze of his wake.
"Fuck..." Avery hissed under his breath. Only now did he manage to pull his eyes away from his screen, and he cupped his hands around his face. His bodily reflexes kicked in, and the pads of his palms tried to rub the soreness away from his eyes.
"No— Shit, cut it out," he scolded himself, peeling his hands away from his face. It'd be unfair for him to get the slightest hint of relief, not when D3rlord3 had to suffer infinitely and eternally, not when his mind would burst and leak out of his skull from the impossible flooding into his brain.
He threw his hands on his keyboard. Maybe it was folly or to keep his hands busy, but Avery's fingers flew across the keys as he typed in the chatbox.
"d3rlord?"
Nothing. The clicking was louder as he typed again.
"Are you ok?"
Still, nothing.
"Come on dude answer me"
Avery's eyes were fixed on the very bottom of the screen. Somewhere, in the very corners of his mind, he knew it was for naught. He knew there'd be nothing, that he was dumb enough to fall for D3rlord3's last trick—not one that was his misery to befall, but one that saved his life.
But there was a reason why it was in the corners of his mind.
"d3rlord?"
"d3rlord???"
It wasn't long before the entire left side of his screen was overtaken with a wall of his own username. Strings of messages tangled together until the white-text words swam in his vision, and what he did end up catching in the web were some egregious typos thanks to his hurried, clumsy fingers.
In a way, the white was a little refreshing for his vision: the color of the colorless, so pure and bleak and perfectly neutral. It was a much-needed break from the revolting yellow he had been looking at for the last fifteen hours, but Avery didn't want the break. What did he do to deserve to see such a perfectly unassuming, unoffending white?
"D3rlord..." Avery whispered into the midnight, "Come on, man... Don't go like this..."
He waited for something to appear. He waited for D3rlord3's username to pop up, to tell him that he was alright and that everything had been his craziest fever dream yet. He waited, and waited, and waited some more.
By the time he dared to take his eyes off the chat log, his eyes darted to the slightest motion in the bottom corner of his laptop. 2:22 A.M., an angel number. The number of trust, balance, harmony.
He knew what it meant. The world was finally safe, finally right. Somehow, it was right without D3rlord3.
The thoughts in the corners of his mind finally broke free and flooded his head. There was no point in waiting for an answer that would never come, no matter how much he believed in the angel numbers and New Year's wishes.
His right hand started to slide off the keyboard, but he yanked it back into place. The small nub on his 'J' key was as blunt as could be, yet it felt like it was stabbing into his fingertip. He felt sick at the thought of closing the chatbox, the dread burrowing deep into his ribs. Closing the chatbox meant that he'd accept that he'd only be talking to himself in this world, that he'd be talking to someone who no longer existed.
All that was left of him was stacked above Avery's torrent of messages to a completely silent world.
His right hand finally fumbled in the darkness for his mouse, and his index finger scrolled up on the wheel.
The last message from D3rlord3 was "Until next time friend." Avery would have thought he'd be more formal, that he'd send him off with something poetic—what else should he expect from the guy with infinite knowledge? Yet it was so casual, even friendly, even though they weren't even friends to begin with. They had simply crossed paths at the worst time, and only one of them had made it out of the crossroads.
He scrolled up more, dragging his eyes over every message D3rlord3 had sent. Minute by minute, he read everything D3rlord3 had to say: the pleas for him to leave, the instructions he left for Avery that led him to nothing, even the long-winded explanations about Minecraft mechanics that Avery had only scratched the surface of. Even in the silence of the night, he could hear D3rlord3's voice in every word.
Finally, he reached their conversation in the library. It was almost funny just how calm D3rlord3 had been for someone who had been driven mad with infinite knowledge, going so far as to crack a few jokes with Avery. He couldn't help but smile as the memory of it replayed in the words—the way his fingers had hesitantly pressed every key with precision, as if afraid to mess up the moment of hope that swelled in that little hidden room.
His own mouth had even whispered the same words to himself, too: "It's you." And even though he was pixels on Avery's screen, D3rlord3 somehow looked so much lovelier than the frenzy he had made on the pages of that book or the clever trail he had left behind. He looked like caution and cleverness itself, like the sign that had snapped him out of his trance, like the sparkle of red-and-gold hope in a world of yellow despair.
So many words were dancing across his vision that Avery almost missed it. It looked to be nothing more than gibberish, and even D3rlord3 had told him to dismiss it. But in a world like this, where every little detail—down to the very pixel—was there for a reason, he knew better than to do that.
Avery had been around on the internet long enough to know it was part of a link; only to what was the question. It was painstaking copying every letter and number into his address bar, just for nothing substantial to show up. He almost wanted to punch his screen when he saw that stupid monster fishing instead of anything helpful.
He attached the end of it to a YouTube search, only for nothing to appear. Truthfully, it was a rather stupid guess of his; YouTube IDs weren't ever that long. He wished he had another idea, another website he could think of that would give him something other than error messages, but in the few hours he had known about him, he knew that D3rlord3 was always the one with the ideas.
Avery rested his forehead in his hand as his finger tapped away on the left button of his mouse. He waited for anything; he hardly cared whether it was his own idea or divine intervention, as long as he had anything to go off on. He scrolled through the messages again, trying to put himself into D3rlord3's head.
He had written a lot down in the book he had left for Avery. Even in his feverish daze, he had written down so much, even if it meant nothing more than a manhunt to Avery when he read it. He, too, had tracked nearly everything across the realms in the world, from the puzzles to the words in the church to the very way that the mountains appeared and disappeared.
Surely, a guy who kept track of so much would need a place to store it. A folder, a drive.
Avery's hands kept slipping onto different keys as he butchered the URL over and over again. Every typo felt like another second wasted until the entire link sprawled across the top of his screen. He thought his 'Enter' key would break from how hard he pressed it.
He was almost blinded by the white screen of the Google Drive. The only color on the page was the icon in the corner, but Avery was too sick of color to enjoy it. There were only two files in the drive: a video and a document, so lonely on the page even though they were sat right beside each other.
In the thumbnail of the footage, he could see the familiar pixels of red and gold. Avery thought his heart would fall through his ribs and out of his chest. His cursor moved to the document instead. Maybe it'd be easier to stomach than someone's last living moments.
He read it. There wasn't anything else to do but read it. The words stayed flat on the page, so tranquil and unrushed, and not a single typo on the page. It was a will and a eulogy in one, yet it was not as stoic or solemn as one. It was warm and wistful, a letter to a bygone friend.
When he reached the end, he went back to the top of the page and read again. The words didn't change, not even by a shift of the pixel. This time, Avery didn't expect them to—final words didn't change, after all.
By the time he reached the bottom a second time, he could barely make out the final words. He only knew them because they were branded behind his eyelids and sunken into every crevice of his mind.
"Whatever you do at the crossroads. Keep going forward."
His laptop screen powered down, submerging him in darkness. The fireworks had stopped long ago, and the entire world was asleep. They'd get to wake up and see another day, another year, and all the years to come. And Avery would get to see them all, too. He'd live to see the fireworks every year and to play another game of Skywars and to watch the waves reach for him on the shoreline, always falling short of him.
Avery hooked his fingers on the top of the screen. It took every ounce of his strength to shut it, and his hand twitched when he heard its soft thud.
He took a deep breath, and then he cried.